The Watchman On The Wall

Eph 6:12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Verse 13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Thursday, July 27, 2017

Friends, this is a very interesting and powerful video concerning the manipulation of the shooting and the photographs taken of the Oswald shooting. Remember Stalin and Hitler doctored many photographs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUkyLuOXhnA

Donald Trump wasn’t the only
presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a foreign
country.

Ukrainian
government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by
publicly questioning his fitness for office.
They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and
suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the
election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on
Trump and his advisers.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was
consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the
Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top
campaign aide Paul
Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the
situation.

The
Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s
resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply
connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.
But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged
hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

Longtime observers suggest that the
rampant corruption, factionalism and economic struggles plaguing Ukraine — not
to mention its ongoing strife with Russia — would render it unable to pull off
an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country’s election. And President Petro Poroshenko’s
administration, along with the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, insists that
Ukraine stayed neutral in the race.

Yet evidence
has been found of Ukrainian government involvement in the 2016 race that strains
diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one
another’s elections.

Russia’s meddling has sparked outrage
from the American body politic. The U.S. intelligence community undertook the
rare move of publicizing its findings on the matter, and President Barack Obama
took several steps to officially retaliate, while members of Congress continue
pushing for more investigations into the hacking and a harder line against
Russia, which was already viewed in Washington as America’s leading foreign
adversary.

Ukraine,
on the other hand, has traditionally enjoyed strong relations with Obama’s
administrations. Its officials worry that could change under Trump, whose team has privately expressed
sentiments ranging from ambivalence to deep skepticism about Poroshenko’s
regime, while sounding unusually friendly notes about Putin’s regime.

Poroshenko is scrambling to alter that
dynamic, recently signing a $50,000-a-month contract with a well-connected
GOP-linked Washington lobbying firm to set up meetings with U.S. government
officials “to strengthen U.S.-Ukrainian relations.”

Revelations about Ukraine’s anti-Trump
efforts could further set back those efforts.

“Things seem to be going from bad to
worse for Ukraine,” said David
A. Merkel, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who helped oversee
U.S. relations with Russia and Ukraine while working in George W. Bush’s State
Department and National Security Council.

Merkel, who has served as an election
observer in Ukrainian presidential elections dating back to 1993, noted there’s
some irony in Ukraine and Russia taking opposite sides in the 2016 presidential
race, given that past Ukrainian elections were widely viewed in Washington’s
foreign policy community as proxy wars between the U.S. and Russia.

“Now, it seems that a U.S. election may
have been seen as a surrogate battle by those in Kiev and Moscow,” Merkel said.

The Ukrainian antipathy for Trump’s
team — and alignment with Clinton’s — can be traced back to late 2013. That’s
when the country’s president,
Viktor Yanukovych, whom Manafort had been advising, abruptly backed out of a
European Union pact linked to anti-corruption reforms. Instead, Yanukovych entered
into a multibillion-dollar bailout agreement with Russia, sparking protests
across Ukraine and prompting Yanukovych to flee the country to Russia under
Putin’s protection.

In the ensuing crisis, Russian troops
moved into the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, and Manafort dropped off the
radar.

Manafort’s
work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative
named Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public
Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a
staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid
her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission
records, though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic
campaigns and the DNC’s arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world.

A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who
maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S. Embassy
in Ukraine, Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for
another client interested in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching
Manafort’s role in Yanukovych’s rise, as well as his ties to the pro-Russian
oligarchs who funded Yanukovych’s political party.

In an interview this month, Chalupa said
she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including
investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence
operatives. While her consulting work at the DNC this past election cycle
centered on mobilizing ethnic communities — including Ukrainian-Americans — she said that, when Trump’s
unlikely presidential campaign began surging in late 2015, she began focusing
more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump’s ties to Russia, as
well.

She said she occasionally shared her
findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, Chalupa said. In January 2016 — months before
Manafort had taken any role in Trump’s campaign — Chalupa told a senior DNC
official that, when it came to Trump’s campaign, “I felt there was a Russia
connection,” Chalupa recalled. “And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul
Manafort to be involved in this election,” said Chalupa, who at the time also
was warning leaders in the Ukrainian-American community that Manafort was
“Putin’s political brain for manipulate ing U.S. foreign policy and elections.”

She
said she shared her concern with Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy
Chaly, and one of his top aides, Oksana Shulyar,during a March 2016 meeting at
the Ukrainian Embassy. According to someone briefed on the meeting,
Chaly said that Manafort was very much on his radar, but that he wasn’t
particularly concerned about the operative’s ties to Trump since he didn’t
believe Trump stood much of a chance of winning the GOP nomination, let alone
the presidency.

That was not an uncommon view at the
time, and, perhaps as a result, Trump’s ties to Russia — let alone Manafort’s —
were not the subject of much attention.That all started to change
just four days after Chalupa’s meeting at the embassy, when it was reported
that Trump had in fact hired Manafort, suggesting that Chalupa may have been on
to something. She quickly found herself in high demand. The day after
Manafort’s hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC’s communications staff on
Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar
with the situation.

A former DNC staffer described the
exchange as an “informal conversation,” saying “‘briefing’ makes it sound way
too formal,” and adding, “We were not directing or driving her work on this.”
Yet, the former DNC staffer and the operative familiar with the situation
agreed that with the DNC’s encouragement, Chalupa asked embassy staff to try to arrange an interview
in which Poroshenko might discuss Manafort’s ties to Yanukovych.

While the embassy declined that
request, officials there became “helpful” in Chalupa’s efforts, she said,
explaining that she traded information and leads with them. “If I asked a
question, they would provide guidance, or if there was someone I needed to
follow up with.” But she stressed, “There were no documents given, nothing like
that.”

Chalupa
said the embassy also worked directly with reporters researching Trump,
Manafort and Russia to point them in the right directions. She added, though, “they were being
very protective and not speaking to the press as much as they should have. I
think they were being careful because their situation was that they had to be
very, very careful because they could not pick sides. It’s a political issue,
and they didn’t want to get involved politically because they couldn’t.”

Shulyar vehemently denied working with
reporters or with Chalupa on anything related to Trump or Manafort, explaining
“we were stormed by many reporters to comment on this subject, but our clear
and adamant position was not to give any comment [and] not to interfere into
the campaign affairs.”

Both
Shulyar and Chalupa said the purpose of their initial meeting was to organize a
June reception at the embassy to promote Ukraine. According to the embassy’s website,
the event highlighted female Ukrainian leaders, featuring speeches by Ukrainian parliamentarian Hanna
Hopko, who discussed “Ukraine’s fight against the Russian aggression in
Donbas,” and longtime Hillary
Clinton confidante Melanne Verveer, who worked for Clinton in the State
Department and was a vocal surrogate during the presidential campaign.

Shulyar said her work with Chalupa
“didn’t involve the campaign,” and she specifically stressed that “We have
never worked to research and disseminate damaging information about Donald
Trump and Paul Manafort.”

But Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the
Ukrainian Embassy under Shulyar, said she instructed him to help Chalupa
research connections between Trump, Manafort and Russia. “Oksana said
that if I had any information, or knew other people who did, then I should
contact Chalupa,” recalled Telizhenko, who is now a political consultant in
Kiev. “They were
coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with
Alexandra Chalupa,” he said, adding “Oksana was keeping it all quiet,”but “the embassy worked very
closely with” Chalupa.

In fact, sources familiar with the
effort say that Shulyar specifically called Telizhenko into a meeting with
Chalupa to provide an update on an American media outlet’s ongoing
investigation into Manafort.

Telizhenko
recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar that, “If we can get enough
information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump’s involvement with Russia, she can get
a hearing in Congress by September.”

Chalupa confirmed that, a week after
Manafort’s hiring was announced, she discussed the possibility of a
congressional investigation with a foreign policy legislative assistant in the
office of Rep. Marcy
Kaptur (D-Ohio), who co-chairs the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus. But,
Chalupa said, “It didn’t go anywhere.”

Asked about the effort, the Kaptur
legislative assistant called it a “touchy subject” in an internal email to
colleagues that was accidentally forwarded to Politico.

Kaptur’s office later emailed an
official statement explaining that the lawmaker is backing a bill to create an
independent commission to investigate “possible outside interference in our
elections.” The office added “at this time, the evidence related to this matter
points to Russia, but Congresswoman Kaptur is concerned with any evidence of
foreign entities interfering in our elections.”

Almost as quickly as Chalupa’s efforts
attracted the attention of the Ukrainian Embassy and Democrats, she also found
herself the subject of some unwanted attention from overseas.

Within a few weeks of her initial
meeting at the embassy with Shulyar and Chaly, Chalupa on April 20 received the first of what became a
series of messages from the administrators of her private Yahoo email account,
warning her that “state-sponsored actors” were trying to hack into her emails.

She kept up her crusade, appearing on a
panel a week after the initial hacking message to discuss her research on
Manafort with a group of Ukrainian investigative journalists gathered at the
Library of Congress for a program sponsored by a U.S. congressional agency
called the Open World Leadership Center.

Center
spokeswoman Maura Shelden stressed that her
group is nonpartisan and ensures “that our delegations hear from both sides of
the aisle, receiving bipartisan information.” She said the Ukrainian
journalists in subsequent days met with Republican officials in North Carolina
and elsewhere. And she said that, before the Library of Congress event, “Open
World’s program manager for Ukraine did contact Chalupa to advise her that Open
World is a nonpartisan agency of the Congress.”

Chalupa,
though, indicated in an email that was later hacked and released by WikiLeaks
that the Open World Leadership Center “put me on the program to speak
specifically about Paul Manafort.”

In the email, which was sent in early
May to then-DNC communications director Luis Miranda, Chalupa noted that she had extended an invitation
to the Library of Congress forum to veteran Washington investigative reporter
Michael Isikoff. Two days before the event, he had published a story for
Yahoo News revealing the unraveling of a $26 million deal between Manafort and
a Russian oligarch related to a telecommunications venture in Ukraine. And
Chalupa wrote in the email she’d been “working with for the past few weeks”
with Isikoff “and connected him to the Ukrainians” at the event.

Isikoff,
who accompanied Chalupa to a reception at the Ukrainian Embassy immediately after the Library of Congress
event, declined to comment.

Chalupa further indicated in her hacked
May email to the DNC that she had additional sensitive information about
Manafort that she intended to share “offline” with Miranda and DNC research director Lauren
Dillon, including “a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware
of that will hit in next few weeks and something I’m working on you should be
aware of.” Explaining that she didn’t feel comfortable sharing the intel over
email, Chalupa attached a screenshot of a warning from Yahoo administrators
about “state-sponsored” hacking on her account, explaining, “Since I started
digging into Manafort these messages have been a daily occurrence on my yahoo
account despite changing my password often.”

Dillon and Miranda declined to comment.

A
DNC official stressed that Chalupa was a consultant paid to do outreach for the
party’s political department, not a researcher. She undertook her
investigations into Trump, Manafort and Russia on her own, and the party did
not incorporate her findings in its dossiers on the subjects, the official
said, stressing that the DNC had been
building robust research books on Trump and his ties to Russia long before
Chalupa began sounding alarms.

Nonetheless, Chalupa’s hacked email
reportedly escalated concerns among top party officials, hardening their
conclusion that Russia likely was behind the cyber intrusions with which the
party was only then beginning to grapple.

Chalupa left the DNC after the
Democratic convention in late July to focus fulltime on her research into
Manafort, Trump and Russia. She
said she provided off-the-record information and guidance to “a lot of
journalists” working on stories related to Manafort and Trump’s Russia
connections, despite what she described as escalating harassment.

About
a month-and-a-half after Chalupa first started receiving hacking alerts,
someone broke into her car outside the Northwest Washington home where she lives with her husband and
three young daughters, she said. They “rampaged it, basically, but didn’t take
anything valuable — left money, sunglasses, $1,200 worth of golf clubs,” she
said, explaining she didn’t file a police report after that incident because
she didn’t connect it to her research and the hacking.

But
by the time a similar vehicle break-in occurred involving two family cars, she
was convinced that it was a Russia-linked intimidation campaign. The police report on the latter
break-in noted that “both vehicles were unlocked by an unknown person and the
interior was ransacked, with papers and the garage openers scattered throughout
the cars. Nothing was taken from the vehicles.”

Then, early in the morning on another
day, a woman “wearing white flowers in her hair” tried to break into her
family’s home at 1:30 a.m., Chalupa said. Shulyar told Chalupa that the
mysterious incident bore some of the hallmarks of intimidation campaigns used
against foreigners in Russia, according to Chalupa.

“This is something that they do to U.S.
diplomats, they do it to Ukrainians. Like, this is how they operate. They break
into people’s homes. They harass people. They’re theatrical about it,” Chalupa
said. “They must have seen when I was writing to the DNC staff, outlining who
Manafort was, pulling articles, saying why it was significant, and painting the
bigger picture.”

In a
Yahoo News story naming Chalupa as one of 16 “ordinary people” who “shaped the
2016 election,” Isikoff wrote that after Chalupa left the DNC, FBI agents
investigating the hacking questioned her and examined her laptop and
smartphone.

Chalupa this month said that, as her
research and role in the election started becoming more public, she began
receiving death threats, along with continued alerts of state-sponsored
hacking. But she said, “None of this has scared me off.”

While it’s not uncommon for outside
operatives to serve as intermediaries between governments and reporters, one of
the more damaging Russia-related stories for the Trump campaign — and certainly
for Manafort — can be traced more directly to the Ukrainian government.

Documents released by an independent
Ukrainian government agency — and publicized by a parliamentarian — appeared to
show $12.7 million in cash payments that were earmarked for Manafort by the
Russia-aligned party of the deposed former president, Yanukovych.

The New York Times, in the August story
revealing the ledgers’ existence, reported that the payments earmarked for
Manafort were “a focus” of an investigation by Ukrainian anti-corruption
officials, while CNN reported days later that the FBI was pursuing an overlapping
inquiry.

Clinton’s campaign seized on the story
to advance Democrats’ argument that Trump’s campaign was closely linked to
Russia. The ledger represented “more troubling connections between Donald
Trump’s team and pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine,” Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager,
said in a statement. He demanded that Trump “disclose campaign chair Paul
Manafort’s and all other campaign employees’ and advisers’ ties to Russian or
pro-Kremlin entities, including whether any of Trump’s employees or advisers
are currently representing and or being paid by them.”

A former Ukrainian investigative
journalist and current parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko, who was elected in 2014 as part
of Poroshenko’s party, held a news conference to highlight the ledgers, and to
urge Ukrainian and American law enforcement to aggressively investigate
Manafort.

“I believe and understand the basis of
these payments are totally against the law — we have the proof from these
books,” Leshchenko said during the news conference, which attracted
international media coverage. “If Mr. Manafort denies any allegations, I think
he has to be interrogated into this case and prove his position that he was not
involved in any misconduct on the territory of Ukraine,” Leshchenko added.

Manafort denied receiving any off-books
cash from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, and said that he had
never been contacted about the ledger by Ukrainian or American investigators,
later saying “I was just caught in the crossfire.”

According to a series of memos reportedly
compiled for Trump’s opponents by a former British intelligence agent,
Yanukovych, in a secret meeting with Putin on the day after the Times published
its report, admitted that he had authorized “substantial kickback payments to
Manafort.” But according to the report, which was published Tuesday by BuzzFeed but
remains unverified. Yanukovych assured Putin “that there was no documentary
trail left behind which could provide clear evidence of this” — an alleged
statement that seemed to implicitly question the authenticity of the ledger.

The scrutiny around the ledgers —
combined with that from other stories about
his Ukraine work —
proved too much, and he stepped down from
the Trump campaign less than a week after the Times story.

At
the time, Leshchenko suggested that his motivation was partly to undermine
Trump. “For me, it was important to show not
only the corruption aspect, but that he is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can
break the geopolitical balance in the world,” Leshchenko said about two weeks
after his news conference. The
NY Times noted that Trump’s candidacy had spurred “Kiev’s wider political
leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene,
however indirectly, in a U.S. election,” and the story quoted Leshchenko asserting
that the majority of Ukraine’s politicians are “on Hillary Clinton’s side.”

But by this month, Leshchenko was
seeking to recast his motivation, saying “I didn’t care who won the U.S.
elections. This was a decision for the American voters to decide.” His goal in
highlighting the ledgers, he said was “to raise these issues on a political
level and emphasize the importance of the investigation.”

A spokesman for Poroshenko distanced
his administration from both Leshchenko’s efforts and those of the agency that
released the ledgers, The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. It was
created in 2014 as a condition for Ukraine to receive aid from the U.S. and the
European Union, and it
signed an evidence-sharing agreement with the FBI in late June — less than a
month and a half before it released the ledgers.

The bureau is “fully independent,” the
Poroshenko spokesman said, adding that when it came to the presidential
administration there was “no targeted action against Manafort.” He added “as to
Serhiy Leshchenko,
he positions himself as a representative of internal opposition in the Bloc of
Petro Poroshenko’s faction, despite [the fact that] he belongs to the faction,”
the spokesman said, adding, “it was about him personally who pushed [the
anti-corruption bureau] to proceed with investigation on Manafort.”

But
an operative who has worked extensively in Ukraine, including as an adviser to
Poroshenko, said it was highly unlikely that either Leshchenko or the
anti-corruption bureau would have pushed the issue without at least tacit
approval from Poroshenko or his closest allies.

“It
was something that Poroshenko was probably aware of and could have stopped if
he wanted to,” said the operative.

And, almost immediately after Trump’s
stunning victory over Clinton, questions began mounting about the
investigations into the ledgers — and the ledgers themselves.

An official with the anti-corruption
bureau told a Ukrainian newspaper, “Mr. Manafort does not have a role in this
case.”

And, while the anti-corruption bureau said
late last month that a “general investigation [is] still ongoing” of the
ledger, it said Manafort is not a target of the investigation. “As he is not
the Ukrainian citizen, [the anti-corruption bureau] by the law couldn’t
investigate him personally,” the bureau said in a statement.

Some
Poroshenko critics have gone further, suggesting that the bureau is backing
away from investigating because the ledgers might have been doctored or even
forged.

Valentyn
Nalyvaichenko, a Ukrainian former
diplomat who served as the country’s head of security under Poroshenko but is
now affiliated with a leading opponent of Poroshenko, said it was fishy that
“only one part of the black ledger appeared.” He asked, “Where is the
handwriting analysis?” and said it was “crazy” to announce an investigation
based on the ledgers. He met last month in Washington with Trump allies, and
said, “of course they all recognize that our [anti-corruption bureau]
intervened in the presidential campaign.”

And in an interview this week, Manafort,
who re-emerged as an informal advisor to Trump after Election Day, suggested
that the ledgers were inauthentic and called their publication “a politically
motivated false attack on me. My role as a paid consultant was public. There
was nothing off the books, but the way that this was presented tried to make it
look shady.”

He added that he felt particularly
wronged by efforts to cast his work in Ukraine as pro-Russian, arguing “all my
efforts were focused on helping Ukraine move into Europe and the West.” He
specifically cited his work on denuclearizing the country and on the European
Union trade and political pact that Yanukovych spurned before fleeing to
Russia. “In no case was I ever involved in anything that would be contrary to
U.S. interests,” Manafort said.

Yet Russia seemed to come to the
defense of Manafort and Trump last month, when a spokeswoman for Russia’s
Foreign Ministry charged that the Ukrainian government used the ledgers as a
political weapon.

“Ukraine seriously complicated the work
of Trump’s election campaign headquarters by planting information according to
which Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, allegedly accepted money from
Ukrainian oligarchs,” Maria
Zakharova said at a news briefing, according to a transcript of her remarks
posted on the Foreign Ministry’s website. “All of you have heard this
remarkable story,” she told assembled reporters.

Beyond any efforts to sabotage Trump,
Ukrainian officials didn’t exactly extend a hand of friendship to the GOP
nominee during the campaign.

The
ambassador, Chaly, penned an op-ed for
The Hill, in which he chastised Trump for a confusing series of statements in
which the GOP candidate at one point expressed a willingness to consider
recognizing Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea as
legitimate. The op-ed made some in the embassy uneasy, sources said.

“That was like too close for comfort,
even for them,” said Chalupa. “That was something that was as risky as they
were going to be.”

Former
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk
warned on Facebook that Trump had “challenged the very values of the free
world.”

Ukraine’s
minister of internal affairs, Arsen Avakov,
piled on, trashing Trump on Twitter in July as a “clown” and asserting that
Trump is “an even bigger danger to the US than terrorism.”

Avakov, in a Facebook post, lashed out
at Trump for his confusing Crimea comments, calling the assessment the
“diagnosis of a dangerous misfit,” according to a translated screenshot
featured in one media report, though he later deleted the post. He called Trump
“dangerous for Ukraine and the US” and noted that Manafort worked with
Yanukovych when the former Ukrainian leader “fled to Russia through Crimea.
Where would Manafort lead Trump?”

The Trump-Ukraine relationship grew
even more fraught in September 2016 with reports that the GOP nominee had
snubbed Poroshenko on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in
New York, where the Ukrainian president tried to meet both major party
candidates, but scored only a meeting with Clinton.

Telizhenko, the former embassy staffer, said
that, during the primaries, Chaly, the country’s ambassador in Washington, had
actually instructed the embassy not to reach out to Trump’s campaign, even as
it was engaging with those of Clinton and Trump’s leading GOP rival, Ted Cruz.

“We had an order not to talk to the
Trump team, because he was critical of Ukraine and the government and his
critical position on Crimea and the conflict,” said Telizhenko. “I was yelled
at when I proposed to talk to Trump,” he said, adding, “The ambassador said not
to get involved — Hillary is going to win.”

This
account was confirmed by Nalyvaichenko, the former diplomat and security chief now affiliated with a Poroshenko
opponent, who said, “The Ukrainian authorities closed all doors and windows —
this is from the Ukrainian side.” He called the strategy “bad and
short-sighted.”

Andriy
Artemenko, a Ukrainian parliamentarian
associated with a conservative opposition party, did meet with Trump’s team
during the campaign and said he personally offered to set up similar meetings
for Chaly but was rebuffed.

“It
was clear that they were supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy,” Artemenko
said. “They did everything from organizing meetings with the Clinton team, to
publicly supporting her, to criticizing Trump. … I think that they simply
didn’t meet because they thought that Hillary would win.”

Shulyar rejected the characterizations
that the embassy had a ban on interacting with Trump, instead explaining that
it “had different diplomats assigned for dealing with different teams tailoring
the content and messaging. So it was not an instruction to abstain from the
engagement but rather an internal discipline for diplomats not to get involved
into a field she or he was not assigned to, but where another colleague was
involved.”

And she pointed out that Chaly traveled to the GOP
convention in Cleveland in late July and met with members of Trump’s foreign
policy team “to highlight the importance of Ukraine and the support of it by the
U.S.”

Despite the outreach, Trump’s campaign
in Cleveland gutted a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform that
called for the U.S. to provide “lethal defensive weapons” for Ukraine to defend
itself against Russian incursion, backers of the measure charged.

The outreach ramped up after Trump’s
victory. Shulyar pointed out that Poroshenko was among the first foreign
leaders to call to congratulate Trump. And she said that, since Election Day,
Chaly has met with close Trump allies, including Sens. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s
nominee for attorney general, and Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, while the ambassador accompanied Ivanna
Klympush-Tsintsadze, Ukraine’s vice prime minister for European and
Euro-Atlantic integration, to a round of Washington meetings with Rep. Tom
Marino (R-Pa.), an early Trump backer, and Jim DeMint, president of The
Heritage Foundation, which played a prominent role in Trump’s transition.

Many Ukrainian officials and operatives
and their American allies see Trump’s inauguration this month (Jan. 2017) as an
existential threat to the country, made worse, they admit, by the dissemination
of the secret ledger, the antagonistic social media posts and the perception that the
embassy meddled against — or at least shut out — Trump.

“It’s really bad. The [Poroshenko]
administration right now is trying to re-coordinate communications,” said
Telizhenko, adding, “The Trump organization doesn’t want to talk to our
administration at all.”

During Nalyvaichenko’s trip to Washington last month, he
detected lingering ill will toward Ukraine from some, and lack of interest from
others, he recalled. “Ukraine is not on the top of the list, not even the
middle,” he said.

Poroshenko’s allies are scrambling to
figure out how to build a relationship with Trump, who is known for harboring
and prosecuting grudges for years.

A delegation of Ukrainian
parliamentarians allied with Poroshenko last month traveled to Washington
partly to try to make inroads with the Trump transition team, but they were
unable to secure a meeting, according to a Washington foreign policy operative
familiar with the trip. And operatives in Washington and Kiev say that after
the election, Poroshenko met in Kiev with top executives from the Washington
lobbying firm BGR — including Ed Rogers and Lester Munson — about how to
navigate the Trump regime.

Weeks
later, BGR reported to the Department of Justice that the government of Ukraine
would pay the firm $50,000 a month to “provide strategic public relations and
government affairs counsel,” including “outreach to U.S. government officials,
non-government organizations, members of the media and other individuals.”

Firm spokesman Jeffrey Birnbaum
suggested that “pro-Putin oligarchs” were already trying to sow doubts about
BGR’s work with Poroshenko. While the firm maintains close relationships with
GOP congressional leaders, several of its principals were dismissive or sharply
critical of Trump during the GOP primary, which could limit their effectiveness
lobbying the new administration.

The Poroshenko regime’s standing with
Trump is considered so dire that the president’s allies after the election
actually reached out to make amends with — and even seek assistance from —
Manafort, according to two operatives familiar with Ukraine’s efforts to make
inroads with Trump.

Meanwhile, Poroshenko’s rivals are
seeking to capitalize on his dicey relationship with Trump’s team. Some are
pressuring him to replace Chaly, a close ally of Poroshenko’s who is being
blamed by critics in Kiev and Washington for implementing — if not engineering
— the country’s anti-Trump efforts, according to Ukrainian and U.S. politicians
and operatives interviewed for this story. They say that several potential
Poroshenko opponents have been through Washington since the election seeking
audiences of their own with Trump allies, though most have failed to do do so.

“None of the Ukrainians have any access
to Trump — they are all desperate to get it, and are willing to pay big for
it,” said one American consultant whose company recently met in Washington with
Yuriy Boyko, a former vice
prime minister under Yanukovych. Boyko, who like Yanukovych has a
pro-Russian worldview, is considering a presidential campaign of his own, and
his representatives offered “to pay a shit-ton of money” to get access to Trump
and his inaugural events, according to the consultant.

The consultant turned down the work,
explaining, “It sounded shady, and we don’t want to get in the middle of that
kind of stuff.”

The DNC operative
at the center of Ukraine election interference was working with Democrats and a
convicted bomber after the election.

Alexandra Chalupa, the former Clinton White House
staffer and DNC operative at the center of the Ukrainian election collusion
scandal, was actively working with Democratic lawmakers just after the election
on the Trump/Russia narrative, enlisting
the aid of convicted serial bomber Brett Kimberlin as she brought a
foreign national into the country to meet with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Kimberlin helped to pay for fake documents in order to smear Pres.
Trump.

The connection to the operative who flew to Rome to acquire those
fake documents existed longer than has previously been reported.

Confusion in the timeline of the Buzzfeed story makes it seem as
though Brett Kimberlin began working with that operative, Jonathan Schwartz, after
being informed of the documents which would later be revealed as fake. A story
released soon after by Chuck
Ross of The Daily Caller tied Alexandra Chalupa into the story,
highlighting her role in bringing Schwartz into the country, this time
regarding accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

However, sources with knowledge of the matter have confirmed that
Schwartz was originally contacted by Alexandra Chalupa through a contact who
was working at the DNC, and that convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin was actively
involved when Schwartz was brought to the United States months earlier, shortly
after the November election.

The new revelations raise further questions about Chalupa’s
involvement with the DNC, after she claimed that she had no involvement.

Two stories by CNN reporter Dan Merica printed denials from the
DNC and from Chalupa herself about any involvement. Both of those stories
however failed to include
a key piece of evidence: an email from Chalupa to former DNC communications
director Luis Miranda that made it clear that Alexandra Chalupa was directly
coordinating with people at the DNC, to whom she promised that “lots more”
would be coming.

That email was from May, but
significantly the WikiLeaks dumps ended in May. Any later emails on the subject
from Chalupa would not have been part of subsequent releases by WikiLeaks.

Sources with knowledge of the matter speculated that the
Democratic National Committee used Chalupa and Kimberlin as intermediaries to
add several layers of distance as they brought Schwartz to America to speak to
congressional Democrats about Russian election meddling. They believe that Alexandra, who also worked with
her sister, New York-based writer Andrea Chalupa, in November, provided one
layer of separation and that Kimberlin, who provided financing for the trip –
with that money’s source unknown – provided a second layer for plausible
deniability.

Kimberlin became known as
the Speedway Bomber in the early 1980s after setting off a series of bombs near
Indianapolis, IN. Police believe that the reason for those bombings was to
cover up the murder of an ex-girlfriend. After serving 17 years in prison he
became active politically, helping found two organizations that have raised
nearly $2 million in the past few years.

Kimberlin has numerous connections
to the Ukraine, including many business dealings in Ukraine shortly after he
was released from prison. Additionally Kimberlin’s wife – who has alleged that
Kimberlin seduced her when she was fourteen years old – is Ukrainian herself.

A
former official with the Democratic National Committee, Alexandra Chalupa. has worked in recent
months with a convicted domestic terrorist-turned-activist known as the
“Speedway Bomber” to gather information on Donald Trump.

That work culminated in a Washington, D.C.
meeting in December between the ex-DNC operative, Alexandra Chalupa, the
convicted bomber, Brett Kimberlin, and a South Africa-born Israeli man named
Yoni Ariel.

Ariel, aka. Jonathan Schwartz, his real
name, traveled to Washington, D.C. to brief Chalupa and Kimberlin on his
knowledge of Russia’s activities during the campaign.

Chalupa,
an activist of Ukrainian heritage who is strongly opposed to Trump, also
directed Ariel to the Justice Department sources said..

Sources
also said that little came of the meetings.

Ariel’s
connection to Kimberlin was first reported by
BuzzFeed News last week, though Chalupa’s involvement with the bomber-activist
is a new revelation.

According
to BuzzFeed, Ariel flew to Rome on the third week of January to purchase a set
of documents purporting to show that ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson paid Trump’s company more
than $1.5 billion in June, seemingly to secure the position of secretary of
state in a Trump administration.

Ariel, 60, paid $9,000 for the
documents, which included copies of wire transfers and bank documents laying
out a transactions involving ExxonMobil and a Chinese mining company.

After
receiving the documents from a source unnamed in its report, BuzzFeed
determined that the documents were part of an elaborate hoax involving shady
businessmen, Italian diplomats, Democratic operatives, Kimberlin and Ariel.

Ariel, pictured above, believing that the papers were
legitimate, informed Kimberlin about the documents, and the convict agreed to
pay for the Israeli’s three flights to Rome to procure them. Kimberlin also
paid the $9,000 asking price.

Ariel
gave the documents to Kimberlin, and, according to BuzzFeed, they were pitched
to numerous outlets, including Bloomberg, The Washington Post and The New York
Times, by an unidentified associate of Kimberlin’s.

Chalupa
is not named in the BuzzFeed report, and Ariel did not discuss the fake papers
with her. Instead, Chalupa met with Ariel to discuss Russia’s involvement in
cyberattacks during the presidential campaign, a topic on which she had been
heavily focused for months.

Ariel was put in touch with Chalupa
through an official with Democrats Abroad, a group affiliated with the DNC that
organizes expatriates.

“I
can neither confirm nor deny that I met with whom I met,” Ariel said in a phone
interview from Israel, though two sources independently confirmed that a
meeting occurred.

The
Chalupa-Kimberlin connection is surprising given both her prominent position
with the DNC and his status as a convicted felon. Indeed, Ariel was surprised
that someone formerly with the DNC would work with him.

“I
had no idea of Brett’s background until the BuzzFeed article, and when I read
it I was sort of surprised,” said Ariel.

“My
initial though, why the hell are the DNC people dealing with a guy like this?”

Kimberlin
earned the nickname “Speedway Bomber” by setting a string of bombs in Speedway,
Indiana in 1978. Though nobody died from the blasts, one Vietnam veteran had his leg amputated due to
injuries suffered during one bombing. Carl DeLong, the victim, committed
suicide in 1983.

Kimberlin, who is in his early 60s, served
17 years in prison for the bombing spree. He gained more notoriety in prison
after he concocted a story about having once sold marijuana to then-Vice
President Dan Quayle. The story was propagated by Cody Shearer, a political
operative who worked for the Clintons in the 1990s. After being released from prison, Kimberlin
has battled conservative activists who have drawn attention to his newfound
career as a left-wing operative.

Kimberlin now works on various voters’
rights initiatives, including in Ukraine.

As for Chalupa, she has served in
several roles for the DNC while also working as an pro-Ukraine activist. A
former staffer in the Bill Clinton White House, Chalupa worked as executive
director for Democrats Abroad in the 2000s and as head of the DNC’s national
ethnic outreach group during the 2016 campaign.

In
her spare time, Chalupa organized social media campaigns against Trump.
One of those efforts encouraged activists to share the Twitter hashtag,
#TreasonousTrump.

Chalupa,
who founded the U.S. United With Ukraine Coalition in 2014, also led the DNC’s
opposition research into any Trump ties to Russia, according to an essay she
recently published at Medium.

Politico reported in
January that Chalupa worked with the Ukrainian government to compile and
disseminate research on links between Trump, his campaign advisers, and the
Russian government.

To
help spread that information, Chalupa relied on “a network of sources in
Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials
and private intelligence operatives,” Politico reported.

One
of the investigative journalists Chalupa worked with was Yahoo! News’ Michael
Isikoff.

In a May 3, 2016 email released by WikiLeaks,
Chalupa informed Luis Miranda, the DNC’s communications director at the time,
that she had “been working with” Isikoff on stories involving Trump campaign
chairman Paul Manafort’s work in Ukraine. She also said she had invited Isikoff
to a conference with dozens of Ukrainian journalists to discuss Manafort, a
former consultant to Viktor Yanukovych, a former Ukrainian president allied
with Vladimir Putin.

Days
before Chalupa’s email, Isikoff published an in-depth report on
an ill-fated business partnership between Manafort and a Russian oligarch
allied with Putin named Oleg Deripaska.

In
her email, Chalupa hinted to Miranda of “a big Trump component…that will
hit in next few weeks.” She also claimed that she was being targeted in
state-sponsored computer hacking attempts because of her research on Manafort.

According
to Politico, Chalupa was paid $412,000 for consulting work from 2004 through
June 2016. The last payment was made on June 20 for $25,000, records filed with
the Federal Election Commission show.

Ariel
first got in touch with Chalupa and Kimberlin after Trump won the election,
sometime in mid-November. The Israeli noted that he had written articles
asserting that Trump colluded with the Russian government to influence the
election.

At the time of his first
contact with Chalupa and Kimberlin, Ariel had not seen the documents that would
later be debunked by BuzzFeed.

The documents soon ended up in the inboxes of several news outlets, but
reporters quickly determined that they were rife with errors. Names were
misspelled; dates didn’t make sense; the gist of the underlying claim didn’t
pass the smell test.

Ariel, who says he once
worked with the the anti-apartheid African National Congress, disputed some of
the BuzzFeed report. He said that the article portrayed him as the party most
responsible for pushing the documents. But he said that he always had at least
some doubt about the veracity of the papers. He also says that he did not send
them to news outlets.